How & Why to Strengthen Your Heart & Cardiovascular Fitness

You don't have to necessarily be the fittest on the planet from a health and cardiovascular risk perspective, but you cannot be the lowest. The magnitude of improvement you see from going from the least fit people around to just the second least fit is almost half to three times the risk reduction.

There doesn't seem to be any reduction in the benefit by continuing to increase your VO2 max .... The higher your VO2 max goes, the more it seems to preserve all cause mortality risk.

Directly from the paper again here: 'The increase in all-cause mortality is associated with reduced cardiorespiratory fitness, which was comparable to or greater than traditional clinical risk factors such as coronary artery, disease, smoking and diabetes.'

If you look at the research on sport performance, there are some clear associations—in fact, some of them are very highly tied—to success in sports and your VO2 max.

When we look at VO2 max and we compare that to say, smoking or cardiovascular disease, it's as strong if not a stronger predictor of how long you're going to live than any of these other metrics.

If I go from the least fit category to the most fit, my risk goes from 64 deaths per 10,000 people down to 18 deaths per 10,000 people.